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What:MediaMath has announced the launch of Helix™, a new business unit offering proprietary data to customers.
Why it matters: Built on top of MediaMath’s Adroit Shopper Co-op, Helix will commercialize the large scale data sets MediaMath’s partners and its clients provide, build predictive audiences and actionable insights, and evolve how programmatic buyers utilize data to drive real results.

MediaMath has announced the launch of Helix™, a new business unit offering proprietary data to customers. Helix will commercialize the large scale data sets MediaMath’s partners and its clients provide, build predictive audiences and actionable insights, and evolve how programmatic buyers utilize data to drive real results. With Helix, MediaMath adds to its stable of industry leading offerings to continue to deliver market-leading solutions to its clients.

Sources from Mediamath told Portada that Helix is currently active in the USA and Canada only. However, plans are in the works to roll out Helix in other markets in the future (2016-2017 timeframe). In addition, Helix is available to advertisers in the USA, including to those targeting US Hispanic audiences.

Back in 2013, MediaMath bought content delivery network Akamai’s ad business and added it to its Adroit business unit. Now, Adroit Digital’s Shopper Cooperative is being spun off into Helix, and the Adroit name and operations will be merged into MediaMath, according to Marketing Land. Jacob Ross, who headed Adroit Digital, has become president of the new Helix. Helix has access to an important  load of shared first-party data from about 300 company members hat had been the Adroit Shopper Co-op. About a third of the top 100 largest retailers in the US are members.

Those members will share their customer info with others in the Co-op. There are almost 500 million active user profiles and monthly data on about US$10 billion worth of e-commerce transactions, Marketing Land has reported . First-party data is said to be considered the highest quality, because it’s a company’s own customers.

According to Ross, advertisers could previously only use this Co-op data if they employed Adroit’s services as a media buyer. Now, anyone who uses MediaMath’s demand-side platform for ad buying — and is a member of the Co-op — can employ the data.

Joe Zawadzki, CEO of MediaMath, suggests that in the three years since the acquisition, MediaMath has been “replatforming it in a couple of different dimensions” and integrating it with MediaMath’s ad-buying tools and data — now it’s unveiling the results of that work.

What Makes Helix Different

There are a few areas that make Helix truly different. Helix starts with real-time, transactional, anonymized data, from one-third of the top 100 largest retailers in the U.S. and hundreds of other member’s data. Helix augments this with the vast data footprint MediaMath is able to command in order to drive true scale. And finally, Helix is seamlessly integrated with MediaMath’s award-winning buying platform, the TerminalOne OS to evolve buying.

Helix is built on the foundation of the Adroit Shopper Co-op, a part of the MediaMath family since 2013 and the largest online shopper data asset in the industry. With the launch of Helix, this data will be further enriched with other assets from MediaMath and its partners to build comprehensive, anonymous customer profiles to drive better marketing results.

“Programmatic’s success is built on the back of data – it is the fuel and exhaust of our industry,” said Jacob Ross, President of Helix. “Even after shifting significant budget, and making investments in and around programmatic strategies, advertisers still struggle with the limited scale of their own customer data and unreliability of third-party data. Helix is MediaMath’s answer to this problem: pooling high quality data that truly helps drive business outcomes.”

“Despite the resounding success of programmatic as a key tenet of marketers’ paid media strategies, using data is still mostly a manual and difficult process – and sometimes it just doesn’t work,” said Joe Zawadzki, CEO of MediaMath. “We’re bringing Helix to the market to help solve that problem. We believe there’s a better way to take advantage of valuable signal that is truly predictive in driving outcomes, and seamlessly tied to media planning and media buying.”

Helix has been working with a limited selection of brands and agencies in a beta phase over the last six months to prepare for today’s launch. “We have a lot of data about our own customers,” said Rachel Silva, AVP of Marketing at Pep Boys, “but that data is limited in scale. Being a member of Helix enables us to tap into a much wider pool of shoppers, many of whom are perfect customers for our brand. These are users we wouldn’t be able to reach without leveraging a powerful aggregated source of shopper behavior data like Helix. We have seen dramatic improvement in campaign performance since joining Helix, and it has become an integral part of our audience targeting strategy.”

“iProspect believes in the power of fresh, quality data to drive effective marketing results and insights for our clients to enable them to accelerate real business outcomes,” said Benjamin Flecha, Director, Data & Insights: Activation & Attribution at iProspect. “We’ve already seen the results, and we’re thrilled to work with Helix as MediaMath doubles down on its commitment to evolve data-driven buying to the next level with a data offering built on a powerful foundation.”

Features and benefits of Helix include:

* Predictive Audiences. Helix leverages high quality transactional data from 300 merchants comprising one-third of the Internet Retailer Top 100 brands, combined with MediaMath’s vast data footprint and deep integrations with global data partners, to deliver predictive audiences to clients.

* Unique and Actionable Insights. Members will be able to access proprietary insights to get a more holistic view of their target audiences, more effectively understand performance and benchmark against the market as a whole.

* Integration with TerminalOne. Helix is deeply integrated with MediaMath’s TerminalOne Operating System, which provides end-to-end programmatic buying capabilities, and which create a seamless feedback loop to ensure maximized performance.

Marketers and agencies who are current MediaMath clients in the U.S. can opt in to access Helix today, other regions will be announced in stages going forward. Interested clients should contact their MediaMath representatives, it’s easy to join and realize immediate benefits.